By 2020 the U.S. will be short 91,000 doctors. There's no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off.

Find that thing that you are passionate about, that you will do day or night whether someone pays you or not...because if you have that, you will have gold.

You need to be a little crazy to change the world, and you can’t really fake it.

NASA calls stuff nominal instead of phenomenal, like it really is. So I have given up that there is going to be a balance and NASA is going to do certain things and we are finally in a state of existence where small groups of individuals can do extraordinary things, funded by single people.

The question companies have to ask, or governments have to ask is, where do we allow crazy ideas to bubble up? Because if there is a failure, what happens? Someone gets blame. There's a lawsuit, there's a congressional investigation. And so, those things shut down the creative engine.

The thing about frontiers, it allows the individuals who are best, whether they're men or women or minorities or whatever, to step to the top. So in traditional societies, old world societies, in the United Kingdom if you would; if you were born into the right stratus, the right class, you had the ability to succeed.

My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.